Pebblebrook Health Center at Park Springs

Pebblebrook Health Center at Park Springs is one of just a couple available nursing homes in Stone Mountain, Georgia. This nursing home was awarded an overall grade of B+, which is very favorable grade. In our view, this facility looks like a good fit for quite a few people. This nursing home's strong profile was highlighted by its inspection grade, which is addressed in the next section.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so favorably is that it was awarded a strong long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care ended up being its second highest category score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A-. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the factors we considered on top of this nursing home's impressive nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.1453 percent of its residents. Vaccines are a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths for seniors. This combination proved to be effective as this nursing home also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.51 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our more positive scores in our short-term care category as well, with a B. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that it was above average in this area with 55.6 percent of its residents returning home.

The next area we looked at was nursing, in which this facility received a B-. This turned out to be this nursing home's worst area. This is nevertheless not the end of the world. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This particular facility provided 5.9 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which was among the higher totals we found. Finally, we also factored some quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. Specifically, we looked at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.